Volker Heine

Volker Heine ( born September 19, 1930 in Hamburg ) is a British physicist.

Heine grew up in New Zealand in the 1940s. From 1948 he studied at the University of Otago ( master's degree in 1953 ) and from 1954 at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his doctorate in 1956. After that, he was a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1957 back to Cambridge, where he " demonstrator " was first, then from 1958 Lecturer, Reader in 1970 and from 1976 until his retirement in 1997 Professor of Physics ( at the Cavendish laboratory ). From 1960 he was a Fellow of Clare College. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (1965 /6), a visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories (1970 /1), in Toronto, at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart ( nonresident Member since 1981).

Heine mainly dealt with the electronic structure of solids and solid surfaces, even with massive computer simulations, so-called " ab initio " calculations. He is a pioneer in the computer simulation of solids, of the then available " mainframe " already used for his dissertation in the 1950s. He worked this closely with mineralogists together ( structure of silicates ).

Since 1974 he is member of the Royal Society.

Awards

Writings

• Group theory in quantum mechanics. Dover 2007
• Marvin Cohen, James C. Phillips: Quantum mechanics of materials. In: Scientific American. Volume 246, June 82, pp. 82ff.